On Ernest J. Gaines

   Ernest J. Gaines:  A Brief Appreciation

"Gaines's responses to both black and white men's literary discourse are central to any theory of his fiction.  The novelist's pervasive concern with how men engage  fundamental questions surrounding personal, communal, and existential identity connects him as much to the legacy of Joyce and Faulkner as it does to Wright."

Keith Clark, Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson, page 68.

"The plantation and the prison both attempt to exercise disciplinary control over bodies as well as over spaces, and this connective tissue repeatedly figures into the constructions of black life, remembered and memorialized, in Gaines's novels.

…

These two help to shape what may be read in Gaines as a black spatial aesthetic and a model for valuing black existence in the rural South."

Thadious M. Davis, Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, & Literature, page265.

Reading Gaines's recent novella The Tragedy of Brady Sims( New York: Vintage, 2017) offers pleasure and recognition.  The book is brief enough to be read in one sitting.  It delivers the pleasure of sensing that Gaines, one of the most accomplished storytellers among American writers, has created a tragedy worthy of comparison with Albert Camus's The Stranger.  Gaines and Camus have intimate knowledge of how different modern and contemporary tragedy as genre is from the ur-forms hammered out in ancient Greek, of how the tragedy we read (and often experience immediately) helps us to articulate the reflexes and bone structures of the existential.  While Camus plays with the absurd in the consciousness of an anti-hero, Gaines uses the techniques and possibilities of oral storytelling to illuminate why the death-bound "hero" of African American tradition masters absurdity as what is normal.  To appreciate more broadly and deeply  what Gaines achieves, we should consult Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature  (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) by Gayl Jones and George E. Kent's seminal article "Ethnic Impact in American Literature (Reflections on a Course)" in CLA Journal, September 1967. Gaines eschews defensive postures and instructs us, to borrow Kent's wording, about "the inexorable limitations of life and all that we associate with the tragic and tragicomic vision."

For indeed, Brady Sims is the outsider who is the insider, the essential but not stereotyped male character in  the body of contemporary African American fiction; he is the black male character who accepts full responsibility for his choices and actions; he is a human rather than an idealized or commercialized  role model for black masculine behavior. Too many black male characters are afflicted with excuses and qualifications and postures that are scripted by American sociological theories.  Not so with Brady Sims.  He is for real in his own spatial and temporal aesthetic.

 Why he chooses to murder his son Jean-Pierre  who has been convicted of murder, to murder his son in the full view of judge, jury, spectators, and the deputies and why he chooses to commit suicide some two hours later when Sheriff Mapes comes to arrest him are the tragic questions for which  the cub reporter Louis Guerin seeks an answer in Lucas Felix's barbershop. We  have commerce with these questions in all the days of our  lives, and it's wonderful to hear them from the perspectives of the old men who make literary discourse in a Bayonne barbershop.

Gaines constructs  Guerin as the focalizing narrator who has to listen patiently before  answers  emerge out the barbershop ritual of old men. before the common sense answer forged in folk psychology escapes out of the mouth of Frank Jamison: "That's why he killed that boy; nobody was going to tie a child of his down in no white-man electric chair.  And he wasn't going to no pen, either" (113).

 Listen is the keyword for Guerin and for us, the readers of the novella, because Gaines exploits  the properties of communication that can be reduced to fiction , thereby  compelling  recognition that what we may need to know is embedded in the talk of extraordinarily ordinary people. It is refreshing, for example  to recognize what Gaines accomplishes in using "tot" as a verb and how he uses cultural geo-tagging to maximize verisimilitude. For good measure (lagniappe), Gaines inserts a  string of ego-centered comments from the unnamed man with the fresh haircut who disrupts the felicity of Guerin's listening.  This donation of a free human interest story is a good foil for what Guerin must purchase with his ears to get material for a human interest article on Brady Sims . But the disruption makes its own contribution to the novella by tempering the seriousness of the tragic with a comic  tale about lying, love and lust for "a big Creole woman" who is impatiently waiting in N'Awlens for the man with the fresh haircut, the man who is humorously paralyzed by the verbal magic of the barbershop.  In the fictive space of Bayonne, which some of us  know from Gaines's previous novels and stories, the plantation and the prison may have disciplinary control, but the most authentic discipline, morality, and control is located in the minds of such characters as Brady Sims.  We must thank Ernest J. Gaines over and over again for his superior innovations within American and African American fictions, for his sharing of what is actual by way of critical realism.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            September 25, 2017